government, and his friend Madison, drafted a series of resolutions, passed by the Virginia
legislature and copied in Kentucky, which asserted that the Acts were unconstitutional and that
the states have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting of the evil.' The proper remedy, they went on, was for individual states to proceed to thenullification' of `such
unauthorised acts.' This is the first we hear of the Doctrine of Nullification, which was to haunt
the republic for decades to come. At the time it had less public impact than the increases in
taxation made inevitable by Adams' construction of a substantial navy, especially a direct tax on
houses, slaves, and land, which hit farmers, planters, and city-dwellers alike, and even provoked
a feeble insurrection known to historians as Fries' Rebellion.
The 1800 election is often referred to as the first contested presidential election but evidence of
the contest is scarce. Jefferson, true to his determination to stand' rather thanrun,' remained at
his home, Monticello, throughout. Adams, now toothless, was incapable of making a public
speech. The issue was decided by Jefferson's standing mate, Burr, whose Tammany organization
carried New York, the swing state. So Jefferson beat Adams by seventy-three votes to sixty-five.
But Burr also got seventy-three votes and under the Constitution the House had to decide which
of them was president. After much skulduggery, the federalists voted for Jefferson, after private
assurances that he would allow many federalist office-holders to keep their jobs.
Jefferson, the exalted idealist, thus began his presidency with a bit of a deal. Indeed it was his
fate all his public life to be forced-some would say that he chose-to compromise in order to
obtain his objectives. He was a means-justifies-the-end casuist. He owed his presidency not just
to Burr, who was manifestly a political crook and the first machine-politician in America, but to
Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) of Massachusetts, who was the second, and, as governor of the state,
the inventor of gerrymandering. Jefferson raises a lot of difficulties for the historian. He is
fascinating because of the range of his activities, the breadth of his imaginative insights, and the
fertility of his inventions. But his inconsistencies are insurmountable and the deeper they are
probed the more his fundamental weaknesses appear. Jefferson suffered from what were clearly
psychosomatic migraines all his life-and many other ills, real and imaginary, too; he was a
monumental hypochondriac-and these tended to increase, as the dislocations in his personality,
beliefs, and practices became more pronounced.
Jefferson's fundamental difficulty can be simply explained: he was a passionate idealist, to
some extent indeed an intellectual puritan, but at the same time a sybarite, an art-lover, and a
fastidious devotee of all life's luxuries. From claret to concubinage, there was no delight he did
not sample, or rather indulge in habitually. This set his views and practices in constant conflict.
Slavery was a case in point: its dark shadow penetrates every corner of his long life. One should
be very careful in judging the Virginia Founding Fathers without making the imaginative leap
into their minds on this issue. Slavery, to those involved in it as planters, was not just a
commercial, economic, and moral issue: it was an intimate part of their way of life. The
emotional vibrations it set up in their lives (and in the lives of their household slaves) are almost
impossible for us to understand. But we have to accept that they were subtly compounded of love
and fear, self-indulgence and self-disgust, friendship and affection, and (not least) family ties.
When Jefferson married the rich widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, and brought her to Monticello,
then already a-building, it is likely that he had a black mistress installed there as a household
servant. When Martha's father, John Wayles, died, she inherited 11,000 acres and fourteen
slaves. Wayles had had a mulatto mistress, Betty Hemings, by whom he had quadroon children
who, under the laws of Virginia, were slaves by birth. So Jefferson's wife was in intimate daily